Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus that requires authentication of a user, a control method therefor, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, information processing apparatuses (image forming apparatuses) such as MFPs having various wireless communication functions, for example, image forming apparatuses having a NFC (near-field communication) communication function and network communication functions such as wireless LAN, and Bluetooth (registered trademark) have been offered on the market. Further, there has been proposed a printing method using NFC communication according to which a print job is sent from a mobile terminal such as a smartphone having the NFC communication function to an image forming apparatus having the communication functions mentioned above, and the image forming apparatus executes the print job (see, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2013-214139).
Specifically, according to the printing method described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2013-214139, upon detecting a mobile terminal 100 coming within an NFC communication zone of an image forming apparatus 200, the image forming apparatus 200 establishes NFC communication with the mobile terminal 100. After that, as shown in FIG. 18, the image forming apparatus 200 sends information on the image forming apparatus 200 (such as an IP address) to the mobile terminal 100 so as to shift into a higher speed network communication using a wireless LAN or Bluetooth (registered trademark) (step S1801).
The mobile terminal 100 then connects to the image forming apparatus 200 by high-speed network communication based on the received information on the image forming apparatus 200 (step S1802), and sends a print job to the image forming apparatus 200 by high-speed network communication (step S1803). After that, the image forming apparatus 200 executes the received print job. In this case, a printing method that establishes NFC communication by holding the mobile terminal 100 over the image forming apparatus 200, and as a result, causes the image forming apparatus 200 to execute a print job is referred to as “NFC touch-to-print printing”.
The image forming apparatus 200 to which the mobile terminal 100 is connected by NFC communication has an NFC unit for NFC communication. In the NFC unit, various information (hereafter referred to as “NDEF information) is set as NDEF (NFC data exchange format), and when NFC communication is established between the image forming apparatus 200 and the mobile terminal 100, the image forming apparatus 200 sends NDEF information to the mobile terminal 100. It should be noted that information which uniquely identifies the image forming apparatus 200 on a network so as to shift into the high-speed network communication described above is an example of NDEF information.
Some image forming apparatuses have a user authentication function, and if execution of NFC touch-to-print printing is allowed when user authentication has not been performed (in other words, when user authentication is unsuccessful), every user such as an unauthorized user may perform NFC touch-to-print printing.